James Gosling is reacting to the many comments on his previous blog, RADlab, scripting and scale[2], in which he stated his affection for scripting languages, before stating his concerns that they tend not to be as effective at scaling, generality, or testability. "I sure stirred up a pile of flaming with my previous post. The internet flame-before-reading tradition is alive and strong."

Jumping off on one frequently debated points is the value of static typing, which one talkback casts into a dichotomy of freedom versus safety. In his response, Safety is Freedom[3], Gosling writes:

One of the slogans that was brought up in the commentary to my previous blog entry was "freedom vs. safety". Once upon a time I used to believe that: it has certainly been conventional wisdom for years. But a lot of the time, the truth is actually that safety is freedom (eg. a good safety harness and rope give you the freedom to climb a mountain).

Also, as an illustration for this blog entry, he has a nice picture of Duke hanging a stocking by the fireplace... if only he'd submitted that for the Holiday Pictures 2005[4] too. Sigh.

Also in today's Weblogs[5],
Krishnan Viswanath takes a new approach forDealing with Command Line Parameters[6]:
"One of the things that keep popping up often is a need to write batch programs that is started from command line. Every single time it's always been either reinvent the wheel or copy/paste from old code. So I recently decided to put an end to this practice by looking at a professioanal CLI solution from Apache."

An Introduction to JMXRemote[9].
JMX programmers know that getting an MBeanServerConnection from a JMXConnector comes with a string attached: no support for the registerMBean() method, and thus no way to register a local MBean with the remote server. The JMXRemote[10] project aims to fix that, and this article shows how it works.

Realtime strategy game Tribal Trouble[12] from OddLabs.com[13] was ranked number two
in the strategy games division[14] of GameTunnel.com's "Game of the Year". Tribal Trouble gained the honor for being fun, entertaining, and easy to play. We're sure that
the fact that the game is pure Java had a
hand in the victory too. Check out the
screenshots[15]. Vikings!

In today's Forums[18],jansan saysJava(TM) Update is getting on my nerves[19]:
"Since recently whenever I send my WinXP box into hibernation and then start it again, there is an error message displayed from "Java(TM) Update" saying something like "The Java update cannot be continued with the current system settings for the internet connection. Please check in windows system control under internet settings -> connections if the settings and proxy information is correct." (my translation from German). I do not remember this happening before I installed Mustang build 63. Is this supposed to be a new feature to make the user's life easier? It is just getting on my nerves to see this message every morning."

cayhorstmann summarizes an annoying bug-tracking experience inRe: GlassFish needs useful exception messages[20]:
"I just discovered the "log viewer" in the admin console. Well, that's certainly nicer than reading the raw server log. Here is a suggestion. When an error message with a stack trace is displayed, why not include a link to the log viewer? 'Click here for more detail' is a lot better than 'Find the logs yourself to prove that you are a Real Programmer'. I realize that the feature needs to be turned off in a production server. But if we can keep a few more budding developers from giving up in frustration, it will be worth it."

David Gelernter's "Linda" programming language and his book Mirror Worlds have been cited by Java technology luminaries as key inspirations. In the interview Computer Visions: A Conversation with David Gelernter[22] talks with him about these inspirations, as well as his recently-articulated "vision of information technology that goes beyond the Web and our current world of files and folders to one centered around what he variously calls 'life beams' or 'information beams'."

"Can your J2EE application sustain a large number of client requests simultaneously? Or does it become sluggish, with painfully slow response times? There are many reasons for such performance bottlenecks and many ways to prevent them. However, sometimes it's just a matter of following some simple best practices that can make all the difference." In Six Steps to Faster J2EE Apps: Performance Tuning with JSP and Servlets[23], Sridhar M S offers design and coding practices to help speed things up.

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Freedom and safety aren't opposites

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